Finally, a TGB book(or close enough)

#1 After reading the table of contents from the amazon site, I feel it is a decent buy for the money which was about 20 or so some odd dollars, not bad. As to how well the author is is another matter, there weren't many reviews. I think I'll buy it, I haven't found any books out there for TGB alone. Nice find.
I read through the contents and there is a good 100 or so pages devoted to all the many aspects of a video game and their set up through TGB.

#2 I see this is by the same author behind Torque for Teens. What's the difference? Is it revised material, a sequel, what?

#3 Torque for Teens was based on TGE. This one seems to be based on TGB.

I had gotten Torque for Teens, not because I am a teen, far from it. I had hoped to get my son to work with it. He has chosen instead the USMC when he grads this June. I tell you, what are the youth these days coming to! ; )

It (Torque for Teens) would be a good book for beginners to start with, it had a lot of "background" info. I imagine 2D Game Building for Teens! will be very similar.

edit: If I get over my irritation for TGB, I may pick it up.

#4 I might get the TGB book just to have a physical book for reference, plus it's dirt cheap :)

#5 Hi,

I purchased the book and so far I am impressed with it. It does teach you a little about the industry if you didnt know much about it. It then covers aspects of creating some artwork.

A full set of tutorials on making a shooter and then finaly packaging it and marketing it.

I would say its worth the money just to have a physical book :)

#6 I've been waiting for any kind of book on TGB since I first became interested in it.

I've spent countless hours in my local bookstore sifting through game programming books to try and learn anything useful. (It's all 3D, including 600+ page books on TGE.) So to finally see a TGB book at all is the "pro." It does have some really clever ways of explaining things like why code has to be written the way computers think vs. how people think. Its also really cheap.

Upon reading, though, this book is pretty scattered. There's almost nothing you can't learn by navigating the Garage Games website, and in many instances, its just a thinly veiled advertisement. It should have boiled down the psychobabble on "why humans like to play" and chapters on the industry and history of video games, but instead boiled down the chapter on the TGB itself. Several pages of that chapter deal with other Torque engines, which is all well and good for an appendix, but for anyone really interested in a thorough TGB reference, this book falls short.

It name-drops constantly, offering long-winded quotes from game design pros which read more like a pep talk than useful information. (Why do I need a half-page photo of Noah Falstein again?) It has pointless, inane comic strips sprinkled throughout, pop culture references that don't explain anything, and more than one illustration that does not fit with the caption underneath it, or the chapter it appears in.

It has 13 pages on Adobe Illustrator, and how to make a single piece of vector art with it. I don't have that, and I'm not buying it. That's half as long as the chapter on TGB itself!

Buyer beware. TGB needs a full-on "Dummies" style book for teens and non-teens alike, collaborated on by the GG gang. This book seems unfinished. Perhaps a revised edition would fill in the cracks.

Oh, and the Tankbuster Demo is for Windows only. Go figure.

#7 Thanks, for the feedback everyone!

#8 I'm going through this book now.

Mike Horans comment says a lot of it when it comes to this book’s short comings. But I'd also like to add how it has simple errors in the code that would surely stop a teen (let alone most other people) dead in their tracks. The very second .cs file the reader is supposed to create has a bug with a variable name.

I found it ironic that in the section where the author tells you to double check your code he lists the code that you just wrote a page before but totally forgets the modification that you just made! This guy really needed to just do one quick pass on his own tutorials before shipping this book. I can't even imagine how frustrated a teen would be trying to figure out their mistakes while doing the tutorial when in fact the mistakes are made by the author.
I’m still having some trouble finishing up the tutorial in chapter 7. I’ve finally got past the part where the author left out the colons in the Switch Statements. Now I’m trying to find out why I get an error message for a line where the author is trying to pull a random number…

function MeanBat::onLevelLoaded(%this, %scenegraph)
{
%this.setLinearVelocityX(-%this.getRandom(%this.minSpeed, %this.maxSpeed));
}

#9 Another huge bug in the first game you create in this book...

The author forgets to tell the player to check the Callback box when doing the World Limits for the coin and the enemy bats.

I didn't figure this out until doing the World Limits for the enemy ghost in the shooter tutorial (which the author finally mentions the Callback box).

Hopefully this comment saves someone some trouble.

I wish the author would have edited his code better. Hopefully he's working on releasing revised tutorials over the web.

#10 Wow! I'm totally spamming this forum but I just had to post the latest discovery.

In the deathray code the author forgets to pass in the '%this' variable. I finally realized his mistake when I was searching through some online tutorials and realized the code in this book was mostly copying the GG tutorials... http://docs.garagegames.com/tgb/official/content/documentation/Tutorials/Shooter/5%20-%20Adding%20Combat.html

There were other errors in his code too that I figured out but too many to list right now. Maybe I'll compile a list or put out my edits for other victims of this book.

In the end I have to actually thank this author... I'm learning so much by trying to complete these broken tutorials! Plus, I kind of like the writing style.

#11 It's OK, Good stuff to know.